Google says it won’t track you after third-party cookies are phased out

Google last year announced that it would slowly phase-out the support for third-party cookies on Chrome web-browser. Today, the company announced that it won’t be tracking netizens using a separate set of identifiers once the third-party cookies are phased out completely.

Google in a blog post today explained that it will not be building its own identifiers after it phases out third-party cookies completely. “Today, we’re making explicit that once third-party cookies are phased out, we will not build alternate identifiers to track individuals as they browse across the web, nor will we use them in our products,” David Temkin, Director of Product Management, Ads Privacy and Trust wrote in a blog post.

“Instead, our web products will be powered by privacy-preserving APIs which prevent individual tracking while still delivering results for advertisers and publishers,” the Google executive added.

That said, the company also clarified that it won’t get rid of targeted advertising completely either. It will just replace the older and more invasive advertising technique with a new method that while being less invasive is capable of delivering similar results. As per a report by The Verge, the company’s alternative to the old method is called Privacy Sandbox, wherein the company hides an individual’s identity in a large group of users with similar interests. Ads are then targeted to these larger groups instead of individual users.

“Our latest tests of FLoC show one way to effectively take third-party cookies out of the advertising equation and instead hide individuals within large crowds of people with common interests. Chrome intends to make FLoC-based cohorts available for public testing through origin trials with its next release this month, and we expect to begin testing FLoC-based cohorts with advertisers in Google Ads in Q2,” Temkin added.